The fact is that Mr Obama has a talented, cynical team around him who have been successful in constructing a narrative in which Mr Romney is a comic villan who wants to ruin the poor and open windows on aeroplanes. Stripped of these people, he has no memorable policies and very few discernible convictions. The emptiness we saw on Wednesday was the real thing.

‘And so today, as the day after, I think the question for you [the media], for the American people is really one of character and whether or not a candidacy that’s so fundamentally rooted in hiding the truth and the facts from the American people and deception is the basis of trust on which you assign the presidency to a person.